Welcome to Litsy!

After finding weird fiction through authors like HP Lovecraft, I became interested in forerunners to the genre. Well, my first sampling of earlier authors was in William Hope Hodgson with his best known work, The House on the Borderland. Not sure of other's experience completely but I was really drawn in by the dark, surreal, dream like visuals more than dramatic narrative. But that satisfied me enough. Next by this author will be The Night Land.

#12booksof2022
My Dec reading was frankly lame. I had a lot going on & it was hard to concentrate. However, I did read this bizarre book which I have been aware of since noticing it in 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die. The description stood out after pages of Dickens & Austen, lol. I can't really describe this book, but some of the chapters are: The Thing in the Pit, The Time of Waiting, The Slowing Rotation. Oh, & of course Swine Things!

A discovered manuscript in the Irish countryside tells of a recluse & his sister & the strange events that happen in their house. The recluse has to fend off an attempted home invasion from a swarm of luminous swine-creatures, & this is only the beginning of this very unusual, mystical, genre bender of a novel that reads like a cross between HG Wells & Lovecraft with a sprinkling of Blakean mysticism.

I loved this more the second time of reading than I remember having done the first time. It's an amazing achievement, I think, to have encompassed the heat-death of the universe billions of years in the future in a slim book written in 1908. That it's not unremittingly bleak seems to be Lovecraft's only criticism of this forerunner of his own conception of Cosmic Horror, though the hope it offers is a tenuous one.

I'd forgotten that the found manuscript relating the Recluse's experiences begins with one of his astral journeys rather than with the Earthbound horrors. It seems to be Hodgson's lengthy descriptions of these otherworldly landscapes that some find heavy going, and which I find myself lost in. They're like the Stargate section of Kubrick's 2001, a dizzying kaleidoscope of images designed to create an impression rather than advance a narrative.

"The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire.”

Decided to go for a comfort read. I've read the corn cob USA edition (atmospheric image, but unrepresentative of the Irish setting), and have decided to go for the silver and purple 1969 UK edition.
Hodgson is one of those love-or-hate authors. I love him despite his manifest flaws, and this book has a nostalgic place in my heart as I was reading it when my wife and I first started courting. She gave me glandular fever, an omen I ignored! 😄

Finished the tagged book for book club. I liked it at first. It felt like a mix of Lovecraft and House of Leaves, but then it just turned too weird, and I stopped caring. At least it counts as a #TeamTheme for #TeamHendrix.
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For being a short book it is dragging so much. 70 pages in and I have no interest nor do I have any desire to keep going with it. This book is just not for me. First DNF of the year and it is my #doublespin 🙈🤣 At least that‘s one less on my TBR right? @TheAromaofBooks

I don't have a lot of opinions on this work other than I enjoyed pieces of it and not the whole thing. I enjoyed the parts where Hermit dude was with Pepper and I enjoyed him defending the pigs. I felt like a lot of the book may have just been going over my head as it was boring. I'm not a big fan of his writing style, but if you like that old victorian style you'll like this.

Not the best cover but the one that adorned the first edition of this classic that I owned - picked up at a playground jumble sale in 1973. A fantastic tale - although everything gets a tad overdone in the last quarter when Hodgson kicks back and really lets the ol‘ psyche rip. I love these journal discovery horror things.

I struggled with rating this one. Given that this changed the game for gothic fiction by elevating it to cosmic horror and that it inspired the master, Lovecraft, I give it a pick. I can imagine how this blew minds in the early 1900s. Swine-things, space travel, time travel all the way to the end of existence as we know it? This is ground-breaking stuff and he deserves a nod. 183/1,001 #1001Books

Boy, if this ain‘t a mood...
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My three editions of Hodgson's cosmic horror classic each evoke different elements of the story with their cover art. From oldest and from the left, this American edition emphasises the isolation of the setting (though not its Irish location!), the middle one the horrors inhabiting the house, and the eldritch nature of the house itself, and finally, the vast reaches of time and space into and through which the protagonist is plunged.

A book I should read before I die? Not at all. It may have had significance for literature development in the early 20th century but it has totally lost its relevance for today‘s readers. So as long as you‘re not interested in literature history, don‘t bother reading this ridiculous gothic book with its hallucinatory plot and swine-things 😱.

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⭐️⭐️⭐️
I really liked the first half of this book. I was interested and very creeped out, my only complaint being that the word “presently” was used a bit excessively. Then somewhere around the halfway point, there‘s a particular thing that happens... and it just keeps going on and on and on, and I lost interest completely. It just went on way too long. It‘s such a bummer. Without that part dragging so much, this probably would have been a pick.

This is kind of fun in an old-fashioned cosmic horror way (if that‘s your thing) (it‘s not mine), but there must have been just an abundance of commas in the early twentieth century. This book is just littered with them.

These commas are KILLING me. 💀Is the holiday stress finally getting to me, or does this bother other grammar nerds too?

A creepy and surreal horror (or weird?) tale. Terrifying beasts ascend from a newly opened pit beside the narrator's home - and from there things only get stranger. Fair warning: the second half is a slog.

Oh and if you or someone you know uses Android, beta testing of Serial Reader is underway! Head to https://www.serialreader.org/android/ to find out more. Thanks! ❤️

Finally! I got bogged down in this book. It started off creepy with great promise. Then got boring and stayed boring. So many questions--it's like reading 2 short stories, but it's 1 novel. So odd, and so glad I'm done! One more check on my 1001 books list, though why is it on there?!

This book is creepy!